Nazi Sharks! (12 page)

Edwina’s hand moved down to the
zipper of his red pants, looking for a burrito in all the salsa. At
last, she unleashed the Chihuahua, which wagged happily and
slobbered a bit against her leg.

Reynolds ripped Edwina’s
panties from under her skirt, and threw them away in horror, after
seeing Burt Reynolds’s macho mustache on their crotch. Angry and
scared to lose the moment, Reynolds shook his head again, seized
Edwina’s soft, slender legs, and prepared to penetrate her.

“Nooooooo!” Reynolds shouted at
the moon, from which his dad and Burt Reynolds stared at him with
disapproving judgment. ‘What? Is this pussy gonna put his dick in
her or is he gonna give us more Sophocles?’ Burt Reynolds seemed to
ask his dad. ‘What’s a Sophocles?’ his dad seemed to wonder.

“No, no, no, no, no, not
again!” he shouted, releasing the magnificent, silken legs.

Edwina jumped up, her heart
racing, wondering if she had forgotten to trim her pubic hair,
“What happened?”

“It’s gone!” he exclaimed, his
head and arms hanging as limp as his dick. “I’ve never been so
close, but it’s gone—look at it, hanging like a gorilla with
advanced depression. All I can think of is Burt Reynolds, Burt
fucking Reynolds and how much better he would be than me. I’m a
virgin, Eddie! How many women must Burt Reynolds have had? One
hundred? Two hundred? Three hundred thousand women?”

He stared at her, as if
expecting some solution to the conundrum, some surprising proof
that Burt Reynolds was actually a pregnant sasquatch.

“Well, I don’t see how he
would’ve found time to manage his fairly impressive film career and
still have that much—”

“Four hundred thousand women,
Eddie! How can I compete with that? I can never please you like he
can!”

“Don’t do this to yourself,”
Edwina pleaded. “It’s you I want. I don’t want to be one in
four-hundred-thousand women—even if that number seems extremely
exaggerated to me. I’d rather be your one and only. Right now, only
you can please me.”

Reynolds seemed lost in a daze,
an alternate universe comprised of chest hair, mustaches, and
biceps, where words and reason could not penetrate—only Burt
Reynolds did penetrating in that world, apparently. In this daze,
Reynolds fumbled in his interior pockets and pulled out a bottle
and a rag. Edwina hoped it was lubricant, but she sensed it wasn’t.
Reynolds soaked the rag with whatever fluid was in the bottle and
looked at it in obvious agony.

“What are you doing?” Edwina
asked.

“What I have to do,” he
answered, with growing panic, like a cornered chupacabra. “I’m
sorry, Edwina, but I have to. It’s women’s fault! You brought the
sharks here! You make men have to be supermen, or worse, Burt
Reynolds! Now you will see the power of The Shark.”

“You’re scaring me… You’re also
confusing me.”

“I could have loved you,
Eddie,” he said, with the hateful eyes of a ghost pepper.

Edwina pushed herself clumsily
to her feet in an effort to escape, but tripped over the semi-burnt
log of driftwood—her nemesis of old. Before she could say, ‘Aha! So
Burt Reynolds was the killer all along!’ the bastard clapped his
chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth. She surrendered her
consciousness and her hopes of giving up her flakey lifestyle. The
universe seemed against it. Edwina’s final sight before plunging
into darkness was Reynolds smiling with grim satisfaction and
shuddering with pleasure as his controlgasm reached its peak.

Chapter 25

Andrea relaxed on the hotel
bed, a tub of yogurt resting between his breasts. She hadn’t taken
a spoonful in minutes. The other girls grew disconcerted, their own
tubs being nearly empty by now.

“You okay, Andrea?” Steph
asked, talking through a mouthful of delicious, vanilla yogurt.
“We’re all taking it hard.”

They had changed into tank tops
and sweats—appropriate female yogurt attire—and began consuming the
cultured dairy product to girl their grief out. So it was okay;
this was what it was for. Get it out; get yogurt in.

“I’m getting a premonition!”
Andrea announced suddenly, her yogurt spilling over her right
breast onto her pant leg.

The girls gasped and gripped
their yogurt containers as they drew closer to Andrea. What the
hell was she talking about?

“Eddie’s on the beach,” she
said. “Burt’s with her. He’s…he’s on top of her. Yes. Her breasts
are basking in the moonlight like engorged walruses digesting on an
untouched shore. His pants are around his ankles, rubbing against
her Disney Princess panties. He’s gagging her with something. He’s
straining. There’s a look of concentration on his face. Now
pleasure. And relief… and… and… that’s it.”

“Huhn, never thought Eddie
would be into that sort of thing,” Nikki pondered.

“It’s always the quiet ones,”
Steph said.

“As long as they’re having a
good time, I guess…”

Andrea felt uneasy, but she had
a cleanup on boob one.

The girls shrugged and returned
to their yogurt. It wasn’t going to eat itself.

Chapter 26

Kevin Costner regarded the
stains on his wifebeater with a certain degree of shame and
humiliation, though the stains on his briefs matched quite well
and, in that sense, were fashionably correct. His monster slippers
shifted nervously under the table. He couldn’t even see the FBI
agents over the enormous mountain of underwear piled on his kitchen
table, but he knew they were judging him—and he deserved it.

“Well, that’s the last of
them,” Warren said with audible relief, dropping the final pair of
ancient, rotting once-white briefs on the kitchen table with a
gloved hand.

“You’re sure that’s all?”

Costner nodded solemnly. “The
dirty. The clean. You been through it all. Except these.”

He pointed to the underwear he
was wearing. They were fresh. He’d only been wearing them for a
week.

“Check ‘em,” Warren told
Walker.

To Walker, life wasn’t unlike a
filthy underwear band crusted with sweat and fecal matter. It
didn’t make him want to examine the still-worn briefs any more. He
reluctantly examined the band as Costner leaned forward, like a
child waiting to be wiped, and found the tag present.

“I told you!” Costner
exclaimed. “My underwear’s been disappearing lately. I don’t know
why. I’ve never thrown away a pair of underwear in my life! I
thought maybe I was crazy—a strange kind of crazy that makes me
think I have way more underwear than I really have. But now you’re
here, so I know I’m not underwear crazy.”

Costner stood up and angrily
tore a pair of briefs in half with almost no force. Mostly because
they were only held together by filth and undiscovered laws of
quantum mechanics. “Some pervert wants to sniff my package—that’s
what it is!”

Warren tried very hard, for his
own sanity, to ignore what Costner just suggested.

“Do you live with anyone, Mr.
Costner?” he asked.

“Just my boy…”

“And his name?” Warren
asked.

“Burt Reynolds.”

“Of course.”

Walker shrugged and returned to
admiring the pile of dead flies at the bottom of a Virgin Mary
statue.

“Do you know where Burt
Reynolds might be?”

Costner threw up his hands in a
display of Latin emotional intensity and growled. “He creeps out
most nights,” he explained. “He says he has a ‘hidey-hole’ when I
ask him. And you know what I tell him? I say, ‘What kind of talk is
that? A hidey-hole? That is what grandmas and pedophiles say. Burt
Reynolds, the real Burt Reynolds, would never say hidey-hole. Even
Tom Selleck would never say hidey-hole. What are you talking about,
hidey-hole?’ What is a hidey-hole? That’s not in my vocabulary,
sir.”

“Well, where is this place?”
Warren asked, not wanting to say ‘hidey-hole’ himself. While
belabored, he had to admit the filthy loser had a point.

“I don’t know. He runs away
after that.” Costner took a swig of tequila directly from the
bottle and hissed his appreciation for the beverage. “Because he’s
a faerie, that’s why he runs away. My boy’s a little faerie. He was
supposed to be a big man like Burt Reynolds. Hah! Couldn’t grow a
mustache if his
My Little Pony
collection
depended on it. In his room? Not one poster of tits. Only
He-Man
.
He-Man
! What kind of gay-gay stuff is that?
Me? I got pictures of tits everywhere. Not in this room, because
the Blessed Virgin would be offended.” Costner crossed himself in
reverence and to ward off all thoughts of Virgin Mary’s Heavenly
bosoms. “But I got them everywhere else. I love tits! Just like
Kevin Costner. Burt Reynolds. Even Tom Selleck loves tits. Loves
them!”

Warren listened to the
half-drunken babbling of the tit-crazed man with growing
detachment. The abusive, pig-headed words of the Faux Costner came
together in his mind and formed a sudden realization. He knew who
the Shakatitt Shark was. He raised his hand to his mouth in shock,
then realized, to even greater horror, that he hadn’t removed his
rubber gloves.

He turned to Walker and strove
to express his chain of reasoning. “Tits… Reynolds… Faeiries…the
Blessed Virgin… Great Caesar’s Ghost, Walker! Don’t you see? Call
all local law-enforcement. I have a hunch we’d better find Mr. Burt
Reynolds. Or should I say, Mr. Shakatitt Shark, and his hidey-hole.
And soon. As soon as ASAP!”

Chapter 27

The first brain was
successfully transplanted. We only got a little bean dip on it. The
shark who received the Commandant’s brain quickly showed himself a
Fuhrer amongst sharks, except with fewer rambling speeches. The man
who received the shark’s brain, moreover, has shown great progress
in law school. The other sharks’ intelligences were synchronized
just by the shark Fuhrer’s presence, shared brain-cells, and
possibly hypnotism. They have become an army. They have become
Nazis. And they have always been sharks.

But they are not yet
laser-blasting robots. Therein lies the age-old problem.

Hitler’s demands have become
excessive and unreasonable. I am frightened.

“He wants to know why a shark
isn’t cooking his vichyssoise,” I told my wife. “I survived only by
convincing him sharks are allergic to leeks!”

“What’s excessive about that?”
she asked coolly. “I have been wondering the same thing.”

I found this strange. She does
not like soup of any kind, let alone French soups. I decided to spy
on her. Not just in the bathroom, but everywhere. That was when I
found she had taken a keen interest in my sharks. When I slept, she
would sneak past the banana pile, careful not to slip on any of the
peels, and out the door of our apartment that leads to the lab.
There she would disrobe, douse her big, white buttocks in krill
oil, and slip into the pool.

Although not specified in our
vows, I would not stand for a wife who has intercourse with marine
life forms. We all must have boundaries. Besides, how will the
sharks ever respect me now? I knew I must re-assert my dominance.
Somehow.

“We need to reprogram the
sharks,” I informed my assistants after careful consideration.
“They must hate not only American divers and baguettes. They must
also hate women, especially beautiful women with immense
mammaries.” I used such medical terminology with my underlings.

My assistants had ceased asking
questions at this point and began the programming using the
Cerebrotron 200, the most advanced brain-to-abacus interface on the
planet. I only hope my lack of forethought doesn’t land a sexy,
American synchronized swim team in trouble some day.

Chapter 28

Edwina had the dream again. The
one where she’s diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer and
begins beating her grandchildren with a penguin known only as “The
Nomad.” Then she had the other, much more reasonable dream, in
which her parents tell her she won’t amount to anything and that
she might as well rely on her pretty face and ‘okay’ chest. She’s
buried to her neck in a solidified glob of nacho cheese all the
while and her dad keeps tossing empty beer cans at her head. Her
mother cackles, “Missed her this time, Charlie! Stupid girl’s not
even good at target practice!” and her dad very inappropriately
comments, “There’s a girl’ll only be good for suckin’ cock.” Her
parents were never quite
that
white
trash—that was one of the few things she had to say in their favor.
She struggled to extricate herself from the unhygienic dairy solid,
but succeeded only in realizing she wasn’t bound in cheese, but
kite string and duct tape.

A reality of beer cans,
discarded fast food, and photographs of forgotten honky tonk
artists faded and blended with the realer and yet less probable
reality of shark movie memorabilia, shark figurines in a variety of
mediums, and dozens of votive candles lit before the shark
paraphernalia.

“I’m more than tits,” Edwina
muttered from her drool-wet lips.

Initially she figured she had
muttered on deaf ears, the illusion having been dispelled. However,
the giant shark figure in the center of the room moved suddenly
into a prostrate position, then lifted itself back up. Her eyes
focused in on the peculiar figure. It was an open-mouthed shark
mask, resting on a man with skin the color of refried beans. He was
clothed only in a disgustingly saggy pair of white briefs with such
heavy, blasphemous staining it could only have come from the
noxious Outer Realm of R’lyeh.

A gleam of incandescent light
across her eyes brought the final piece of the puzzle to Edwina’s
attention: the foot-long, curved blade in the figure’s hands. The
events of the evening came flooding back. She knew she was in the
terrible fins of the Shakatitt Shark. And worse, he almost got to
fourth base with her. How had she not known such madness lurked
beneath the surface of the charming Mexican man known as ‘Burt
Reynolds?’ Her friends’ extremely lateral use of logic had been
right and she’d ignored it. Maybe her parents were right after all.
Maybe Reagan really had been a time-traveller come to set the world
back on the right temporal course. And maybe she really was no good
but for tits and ass.